Yandex Buying Twitter ‘Newspaper’ Maker The Tweeted Times

Russia’s leading search engine is making a foray in the nascent market segment of socially-organised news delivery, by buying The Tweeted Times.

Nasdaq-listed Yandex explains: “Using these technologies, we plan to better answer questions about what is discussed in social networks – that is, almost everything that happens around you.” Terms are not disclosed.

The service is a rival to web services like Paper.li and Postano and a range of apps including Flipboard.

Whilst The Tweeted Times appears less popular than Paper.li, it works very well on the web and is also available in app form. Creators Maxim Grinev and Maria Grineva are joining Yandex’s startup team.

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The idea underpinning each service is to disintermediate professional news editors as the curators of news stories delivered to readers because the news links tweeted by people users follow supposedly present a more relevant “newspaper”.

It’s a hubristic and self-referential notion, and one that a few tweeters appear to be adhering to. Here is the “newspaper” The Tweeted Times created for me based on news links tweeted by people I follow.